


Book Ends

by smallricochet



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Transcendence AU, post-unknown, transcendence au crossover, what if, wirt has a conscientious lack of heart and that's alright
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 03:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2606186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smallricochet/pseuds/smallricochet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wirt is a little less human, life goes on. </p><p>((There’s an unfairness in the world, a middling point when you are just clever enough to fail in a more spectacular way, with everyone watching. There’s a lot of small unfairnesses like that. You just have to realize that life and time goes on, and everything will be forgotten, and the world is bigger than you anyway. Somewhere, somebody probably has it worse.</p><p>You are totally going to die.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	Book Ends

There’s an unfairness in the world, a middling point when you are just clever enough to fail in a more spectacular way, with everyone watching.   
There’s a lot of small unfairnesses like that. You just have to realize that life and time goes on, everything will be forgotten, and the world is bigger than you anyway. Somewhere, somebody probably has it worse.

You are totally going to die.

  
“Are y-you?” Wirt stutters a little, and opens the door. Before anyone can do anything, he puffs air at the flame, and the reaction is all he can ask for. He raises an eyebrow, total scorn.

“Yeah. We’re not doing anything. Me and my brother are going home.” He knows exactly what to do in that instance, he drops the lantern back in front of the Woodsman and turns to face the now familiar vines. He woke up in these, once.

The axe is heavy but cuts the roots easily enough, and Greg is freed. They go home.

  
Ten years later, the Transcendence happens.

It hits him in the heart, all at once, because his soul is doing a little tap dance against his body, it’s trying to separate which is against his very nature as an ORDINARY HUMAN BEING, and it’s really getting quite off-putting.

"Hand it over," the first mugger demands about his wallet, looking a bit thrown. Wirt supposes his mugging victims usually don’t double over in heart attacks. You never know though. There’s probably a suit about it somewhere. 

His soul divorces his flesh and he rears up, a monster of shadow and darkness, and roars. The insanity shines from his eyes like torchlight and the men scream, they run into the darkness.

Greg is the only one who stays, after that.

In later years, he would realize the price of the forest was dying.   
And Gregory made one wish, not for himself.   
At that time, Wirt was not able to leave. It was too late, he had given up, his heart had gave out, his soul became a permanent fixture of the Unknown, until it wasn’t.

There was a certain sort of contract there, between the ritual prayers and defixios and chanting dead pumpkin heads, and the moment it expired was the moment the fabric between the worlds shifted just enough to end everything. Just as effectively those scissors sliced through those bird feather wings, his bond was snapped and he remembered death. He remembered a lot about dying actually, it was pretty terrible.

Wirt lay on the ground, and heaved silently. If people could put their feelings in jars, then he had just opened up his; he was Wirt again, but for a few moments he was a terrified 15 year old lost in the woods, cold curling through him like vice and a remnant flicker of despair licking up his spine.

It took him a few seconds for him to remember his humanity. To his horror, he was already used to this sort of thing.

And that was the end of Wirt.

But he still liked to pretend.

————

A:  _it started this way._

The moment her eyes catch the photo her face twists uncontrollably to a visceral mix of horror and shock, and she smooths it over like it never happened. “Where did you see that?” 

Wirt glances at the photo, it’s something Gregory drew- a little vague sketch of bluebirds and pumpkins-for-heads, one of many things Gregory fervently believed in, then less fervently, then shown only in quiet sketches on the margins of his notebooks at school. 

"They’re… bluebirds. Beatrice, I guess. That’s her name." He squints. "Some dancing pumpkins, I guess? You know, kid stuff."

"You were there too," she whispers, and takes a step back. 

"Ah, erm, what?" He stalls, flicking over half-remembered features. "Wait, are you talking about-"

"The Unknown," she whispers, and screams. 

Wirt blinks a few times in astonishment. “Shhhh. Shhh! Are you alright? Please, Lorna-“ 

"Leave me alone! You’re the one! Because of you, you’re the one who-"

—————————

B: _Gregory_

Gregory is playing by the stream, a metal bucket in one hand and a dirty trowel in the other. He probably stole it from Old Woman Daniels, he still tended to snatch things not under superglue and/or intense adult supervision.

He’s laughing, at something in the water, it dribbles over rocks in small splashes and fills the air with a scent of joy. Wirt slows to a stop to just take it all in.

"You find any frogs lately?"

Gregory stops. He turns, eyes bright, and levels his trowel straight at Wirt’s heart. ”Jason Funderberker died years ago, Wirt.” 

"Well," says Wirt, "you never found Funderberker the 2nd?" 

Greg rolls his eyes. “I’m too old for frogs now! Now, I need minnows. Minnows are  _key_!” 

"They are very- very shiny," Wirt admits, trying to move closer without slipping and cracking open his head over the slick rocks. "Are you going to keep them as pets?"

Gregory frowns, knee-deep in water, face speckled in sun freckles and smears of mud. “Nothing can ever replace Jason Funderberker. He was a special frog.” He hesitates, something new and terrible, and lowers his trowel into his metal bucket. “But maybe we can find his new body. Do you… do you want to help?” 

Wirt has things to do later. He has a list of homework a table high, a few reports and a part time job to finish it all off. It’s all very important and resumeyey.

Of course he spends the entire afternoon finding the true replacement minnow of Jason Funderberker, deceased in body, but not in soul.

———————

C:  _other_

College is nice, really. It’s a really roundabout way to learn about things you need to know for jobs, and is really quite relaxing, all things considered. Wirt likes it there. 

"Wirt!" Sara comes to a stop next to him, books hugged to her chest and poking out of her backpack. "We need to stop meeting like this." 

"Do we?" blurts Wirt, and takes it back mentally. "I mean, I really love meeting you, here, on campus. Is that a book about Jainism?" 

"Hm? Oh, yeah, I’m really into that sort of stuff. Did you know there’s an entire major dedicated to just stuff like folklore and religious studies? Apparently there’s some growing trend to do with mythological creatures lately. I’ve looked into the reports, and I think there may be something to it!" She blushed. "Ooooh, it’s crazy, yet fascinating." 

Wirt laughs nervously. “Y-yeah. I mean, I never studied much about Punarjanma and stuff but I didn’t know you liked it that much.” He gestures wildly at her book. “Have you read the Rigveda? It’s probably not required, but it goes much more in depth to the original principles then those casebooks.”

Sara looks at him, impressed. She makes that look a lot lately, as well as that inquisitive head tilt that is, frankly, adorable. “No, I haven’t. Would you like to meet up later, to talk about it?” 

Wirt is tongue tied. “Nothing would give me as much pleasure,” he finally manages, and Sara grins in a delighted way, it lights her face up like fire and glows inside out. This is not a metaphor. Vaguely, Wirt wonders about possession and ghosts. He kinda stayed away from that stuff, after a while. 

"Theen, dinner at 7?"

"Yeah," Wirt said, a smile curling up his face. "See you there."

———————————-

The Transcendence meant many things. It meant that demons were a thing, for one. It meant a lot of supernatural walls got knocked over sometime overnight, shamans and old magic and names suddenly had a lot more weight, and the air and trees bent under the magic in the world.

It meant Gregory cut out mid-questionable-drive because a giant leafy plant burst up in the middle of the road, and it meant Wirt collapsing in the sidewalk of a city and being snapped into the middle of a great deal of forced reincarnation. 

"Wirt, I’m fine, I’m fine," Gregory whispers, his hand against the window. This is a new thing, now, where Wirt doesn’t much like hospitals, full of lifespans forced beyond a natural expiration and the false technology that held them there. The bright lights and cold walls and lack of shadowed trees. 

Wirt breathes out a sigh of relief, it forms a little condensation on the window pane. “Open it,” he says, making appropriate hand motions, then carefully checks over himself to make sure all his limbs are in the right place, so to speak. No weird outgrowths, no dripping dark vines, just a perfectly normal human visiting his brother in the aftermath of the Transcendence. 

Gregory shakes his head at him and grins, a hint of old spark stark in Wirt’s swirling eyes. “You still look kinda like a lake monster, so the nurses will probably try to shoot you or something. That would be,” he pauses for effect, “bad!” 

Wirt retakes inventory. There are leaves draped all over his person, damp from rain and dirt and sleeping in the mud and his hair is matted and he sees where Gregory is coming from, a little. ”Eugh. Okay. I’ll be back,” he assures, and trudges away to take a shower. Somewhere. Somehow. It’s not like anyone can keep him away. 

Wirt comes back 20 minutes later, clean and straight, a lanky fifteen again to match Gregory. “Did you miss me?” Wirt says anxiously, wringing a small cone shaped hat in his hands. He has a blue cape on, in all it makes him look like he’s on some sort of Quest. 

Gregory grins under his baseball cap and slaps Wirt hard in the back. “Of course I did! Now let’s go find that lantern.” 

Unconsciously, Wirt puts his hand to his chest, feeling his heart pound in a complete absence of blood. 

You see, the lantern was never a deal for evading death in the first place. It was a means of defeating a monster who held its’ heart outside it’s body. An ancient duty, a proud tradition, a passing torch. When the Woodsman died and the Beast was slain and all the lost souls curled around it, the forest slowly started to change. Lost souls became quietly dead instead of adventurously, and the Lantern slowly started trying to find it’s true owner. Then there was a crack in the world. That was always how the light got in. 

"Yeah," he says, taking his brother’s hand in his. "Let’s go." 

Wirt had always experienced that embarrassing middling point when you are just clever enough to fail in a more spectacular way, much later. The good heartedness of a little boy and the wily earnesty of his older brother ten years past come back all in a rush, like some sort of folksy cautionary tale about not forgetting where you leave your heart. But that’s just how it is. There’s a lot of small unfairnesses like that. You just have to realize that life and time goes on, and everything will be forgotten, and the world is bigger than you anyway.

You just have to remember, somewhere, somebody probably has it worse.

.

.

.

(((About 2,500 miles away, a young boy jerks awake, beckoned by the call of yet another soul. His name is Dipper Pines, and recently he has merged with an insane omnipotent murderous demon and possibly sparked the destruction of the world as we know it. This is not his story.)))


End file.
